Success story:

Norse Group 

Norse Group is Britain's largest local authority trading company (LATCo), wholly owned by Norfolk County Council. Operating across facilities management, property services, care, and environmental services, Norse has 36 partnerships across England and Wales and a workforce of over 6,000 people.

As one of the UK's fastest-growing public sector service providers, Norse's ambition is clear: to deliver ethical value for its public sector partners, invest in its people, and scale its services without compromising on quality.

Growth through TUPE transfers and contract acquisitions had served Norse well but it had also created complexity. Every new contract brought its own processes, its own systems, its own way of doing things. By 2022, HR was holding together a patchwork of inherited workflows that made consistent, reliable service delivery almost impossible.

Norse's own analysis told a stark story. More than 1,000 uncontrolled job titles existed across the organisation, with no consistent job architecture. Contract change requests were managed through Excel forms. The core HR system had been in place for over a decade with large areas of functionality never used. Data sat across multiple systems, making accurate reporting virtually impossible.

The impact was felt by everyone. Norse found that 54% of HR's total FTE time was spent on services where process, technology or capacity had identified problems, with the knock-on effect felt daily by employees, from slow contract turnarounds to limited visibility of their own information. HR Business Partners, recruited to provide strategic input, were instead spending their days firefighting operational issues.

For the Senior Management Team, the priority was clear: before Norse could scale further, it needed to get the HR foundations right. Better HR services wouldn't just improve efficiency, they would directly support the experience of working for Norse and aid retention.

In July 2022, Norse commissioned a comprehensive review of its HR function to better understand the current delivery model and identify the key issues impacting service effectiveness. This review was informed by interviews, deep-dive sessions, activity analysis, and facilitated workshops with the HR and Business Operational Teams.

The findings highlighted a number of fundamental challenges within the existing HR operating model. Processes were largely inherited from multiple contracts and business units rather than designed around best practice, resulting in inconsistency, duplication, and a heavy reliance on tacit knowledge held by long-serving employees. Governance arrangements were not fully defined, with variation across business units creating complexity, inconsistency, and risks.

The previous systems landscape was fragmented and heavily reliant on manual, paper-based processes, with limited use of automation.

Previous core HR systems were underutilised, contributing to a poor user experience and weak data integrity. Employee data was held across multiple systems, leading to duplication, gaps in critical information, and limited ability to generate meaningful insight.

In addition, the employee query model was similarly constrained, with limited self-service capability and no consistent case management approach, resulting in inefficiencies and a suboptimal employee experience.

Overall, those challenges combined created a complex, inconsistent, and resource-intensive HR operating model that limited scalability, insight, and service quality.

Norse needed more than a system replacement. With multiple business units, a diverse workforce spanning office, care and operational roles, and serious growth ambitions, the organisation needed a single, scalable HR suite that could grow with them, not a collection of point solutions that would replicate the same fragmentation they were trying to escape.

PeopleXD Evo gave Norse a unified suite covering the entire employee lifecycle, from recruitment and employee onboarding through to workforce management, learning, talent, and payroll. Norse could start with immediate operational priorities and expand the suite at a pace that suited the business, without rebuilding earlier work or creating new silos.

Crucially, everything ran on the same platform and shared the same data. That meant every new capability Norse switched on amplified the value of everything already in place.

"Norse chose PeopleXD Evo as it provided the functionality needed to make the required HR Transformation a success." Jon Phillips - Project Director. 

Norse didn't switch everything on at once. Instead, Project One - the internal name for the programme - followed a phased approach that stabilised core operations first, then built capability from there.

Getting the foundations right (2023) 

The first phase focused on replacing paper-based and inconsistent workflows with digital processes built on a single data structure. Recruitment, onboarding, screening, case management, and job architecture were the priorities. Job Architecture alone reduced over 1,000 uncontrolled job titles to 434 standardised roles, giving managers the clarity to run recruitment independently for the first time.

“The implementation of the manager led PeopleXD system has significantly enhanced the efficiency and effectiveness of key processes across Norse. It has provided managers with substantially greater control over recruitment requisitions, improved visibility into the DBS process and its progress, and a more streamlined onboarding experience for new starters. Collectively, these improvements have empowered managers to take ownership of activities that were previously managed by remote departments, while also reducing the operational burden on the support teams that formerly handled them” - Philippa Ruggier, Area Manager Catering 

Building operational capability (2024)

With the foundations stable, Norse extended the suite to tackle higher-volume, operationally sensitive activity, particularly in Care, where accurate workforce information is critical for safe staffing and compliance. Workforce Management, joiners, movers and leavers, and holiday management were introduced, alongside a risk-based approach to case management that freed HR Business Partners from day-to-day firefighting.

"The variation rejection rate is greatly reduced, and the service level is now a few hours rather than weeks." 

Adding intelligence (2025)

With core operations running reliably, Norse expanded the suite into reporting, learning and talent - areas that had been difficult to prioritise while the basics needed fixing. Payroll, absence management and expenses are currently in progress.

Norse delivered £1.1m in net annual benefit, with a projected five-year benefit of £5.5m. The HR function reduced by 10.9 FTE, while service quality improved, improving the HR-to-employee ratio from 1:159 to 1:191. HR Business Partners, previously tied up in transactional activity, have had 6.2 FTE worth of operational work removed from their workload. They now operate as genuine strategic partners to the business.

Operationally, the before-and-after is striking. Contract change requests that took up to a month now take an average of 1.28 days. The contract backlog is zero. 76% of new hires sign digitally on mobile. Screening turnaround is consistent and compliant at 18 days.

And in Care, where the stakes are highest, digital workforce management has delivered over £1m in annual labour savings with more to come as Norse continues to roll out the capability across other service areas.

“Implementing PeopleXD Evo has fundamentally changed how we operate. We’ve seen measurable improvements in speed, consistency and cost efficiency across core HR and workforce processes, with tangible benefits for managers, employees and the organisation as a whole. The platform has given us a scalable operating model that supports growth while continuing to deliver real financial and service value” – Justin Gallford, Chief Executive 

Norse's transformation has created a foundation for continued growth. Payroll, absence management and expenses will bring more processes onto the same platform. Workforce Management will extend beyond Care into other service areas. And as Norse's data quality continues to improve, the organisation will be better placed than ever to use people analytics for workforce planning and strategic decision-making.

“This transformation marks the beginning of an ongoing partnership, where continuous innovation and insight will help Norse adapt, grow, and lead with confidence in an increasingly data-driven world” - Ellisa Cryan, Systems Manager

Norse Group's story is about more than technology. It's about what becomes possible when an organisation has one connected HR platform, one source of truth, and a partner invested in their long-term success.

From a fragmented, manual HR function to a scalable, digital operation delivering over £1m in annual savings, Norse expanded their suite step by step, without disruption, without duplication, and without starting over from scratch.

That's the power of the PeopleXD Evo suite.

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